- 68
* Pier Francesco Mola Coldrerio 1612 - 1666 Rome
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Description
- Pier Francesco Mola
- erminia writing the name of tancred on a tree
bears several old attributions to Mola on the mount, a number 1718 in pencil on the recto, and an inscription in pen and brown ink on the back of the mount: A Sketch for a Picture on cloth, in the French King's Collection. /2.f.t 11/4inch high, by 2.f.t.3 1/4 Inch.wide. Vide Catalogue raisonné / des Tableaux du Roy, par M. Lépicié. Tom.II p.314.5.
black chalk with touches of red chalk and red wash
Provenance
Paignon-Dijonval Collection (according to a pencil inscription on the back of the mount)
Catalogue Note
The painting by Mola to which the old inscription on the back of the mount refers was sold in 1685 to Louis XIV and is now in the Louvre (see Pier Francesco Mola, exhibition catalogue, Lugano, Museo Cantonale d' Arte, 1989, p.176, no. I. 24, reproduced p. 180). It shows Erminia seated in a landscape writing the name of Tancred, and has generally been dated to the end of the 1660s. The other autograph painting of a similar subject is Erminia guarding her flock in which Erminia, wearing a draped cloth similar to that in the drawing, is standing and writing the name of Tancred on a tree to her right (see Richard Cocke, Pier Francesco Mola, Oxford 1972, p. 50, no. 26, reproduced pl. 27). The drawing seems to be closer to that painting and it could reflect a stage in the development of the final composition. It is also very plausible that Mola painted other versions of this attractive subject from the Gerusalemme Liberata, which have not survived.